Keynote Speaker:María Emma Mejía

María Emma Mejía Vélez was born on the 27th of September, 1953. Mejía is a Colombian journalist and diplomat. She served as the 2nd Secretary General of the Union of South American Nations from 2011 to 2012, as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Colombia from 1996 to 1998, and as the Ambassador of Colombia to Spain from 1993 to 1995.

She currently works as Executive President of Pies Descalzos Foundation, a charity founded by the Colombian singer-songwriter Shakira, and collaborates as a journalist for El Radar, a Colombian investigative television news program that airs in Caracol TV. Míjares was born in Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia to Luis Mejía Arango and Sofía Vélez Pérez. After graduating from the Gimnasio Los Pinares high school in Medellín, on November 1971, she worked for a short time as a fashion model. She went on to study Social communication at the Pontifical Bolivarian University, from where she did not graduate, to go on sabbatical to London where she held various jobs including working for the Colombian Consulate and the BBC. While at London she also studied cinematography and television which lead her to direct two films by the age of 23. On her return to Colombia Fernando Gómez Agudelo, a pioneer of the Colombian television industry, named her assistant to the writer and director Bernardo Romero Pereiro.

María Emma entered politics thanks to her work as a film director, when President Belisario Betancur named her Director of the Cinematographic Fomenting Company (FOCINE) making this her first public post. Her work as Director of FOCINE was seen as successful for achieving greater State support for the Film Industry of Colombia, but at the same time her success was criticized for only benefiting a few group of film producers.

After her work in FOCINE she became attracted to the ideas of Luis Carlos Galán, and it was his assassination which drove her to become more politically active, this time working with the presidential electoral campaign of César Gaviria Trujillo as Secretary General of the campaign. After the election, Gaviria Trujillo named her as head of the Presidential Security Advisory Council on Medellín. As head of this advisory council she was faced with a barrage of existing and growing problems that included the violent rule of Pablo Escobar that had transformed Medellín into a battle field of car bombs explosions, drug trade, and shanty towns.

During her tenure as Colombia’s foreign minister, María Emma Mejía worked to solve these problems, participating as a government negotiator in talks with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – FARC) and Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army—ELN), working with the United States to stem the illicit drug trade, and overseeing a significant drop in the number of violent incidents at the Colombian-Venezuelan border. Ms. Mejía has been presidential adviser for security in Medellín and the Colombian ambassador to Spain, as well as the minister of education. She holds degrees from the Universidad Pontifica Bolivariana de Medellín and the Universidad del Valle.